City of Exiles (9781101607596)

by Nevala-lee, Alec

  Dancy granted the point. “Of course. You aren’t a man we want out of our sight.” He spread his large hands. “So what do you say?”

  “I’ll think about it,” Ilya said. Catching the eye of the guard beyond the glass, he signaled that he wanted to be let out. A second later, the door was unbolted and opened from the outside.

  As Ilya rose from his chair, Dancy spoke without looking up. “You know, there are times when I think you went to the tournament knowing you were likely to be caught, but were prepared for this, if it brought you closer to Vasylenko.” Dancy lifted his eyes. “Am I right?”

  “If I were as smart as that, I never would have come back to London,” Ilya said. Then he turned aside, leaving the solicitor alone.

  Ilya followed the guard back down the hallway, passing through the gates that led to his own spur. As he walked, he considered the implications of the meeting. An offer from a lawyer always contained more than it seemed, like an optical illusion, or the meanings of words in scripture. But as he waited for the guard to unlock the gate of the secure area, he was struck by one detail of their exchange.

  Vasylenko, the solicitor had pointed out, was a useful man. There were those on the outside who, because of custom or tradition, would follow him. Within these walls, however, he was less useful. And when Ilya set this fact against Vasylenko’s advanced age, and the fact that the old man did not want to die in prison, it made him wonder what else these men had in mind.

  He followed the guard up the metal steps, then waited as the door of his cell was unlocked and drawn back. The guard stood aside as Ilya went in, then wordlessly shut the door.

  Ilya looked around the cell. When his eye fell on his books, he found himself thinking of Wolfe, who had brought him these two volumes. These days, whenever his thoughts turned in her direction, he saw that he had been wrong about her. In some cases, perhaps, you could find justice as a part of the system, as long as the system did not become a part of you.

  And for all the assistance he had rendered to Wolfe, he also knew that he would never be allowed to leave this place. Dancy had been right. There would be no chance of acquittal.

  Going to the shelf, he took down one of the books. It was the collection of midrashim that he had carried to the chess tournament, bringing it with him just in case. Studying the cover now, he thought again of scripture as a house of locked passages, a key set at random before each door. Then, opening the book to a page he had marked, he began to read from the commentary on Manasseh.

  Manasseh, Ilya knew, was a king who had killed the prophet Isaiah and raised pagan altars within the temple, sins that later generations had blamed for the destruction of the kingdom of Judah. Among his other outrages, he had dedicated a chariot and horses to the god of the sun, which is why, much later, Ezekiel had not included a horse in his vision of the chariot. Instead, the wheels had turned by themselves, showing that God had followed his chosen people into exile.

  In the end, however, Manasseh himself had been taken as an exile to Babylon, where they had bound him with fetters and led him by a ring in the nose. After his return, he had reassumed the throne, repented, and given up idolatry. And his reign of more than fifty years was the longest in the Bible.

  The rabbis had been disquieted by this story, which seemed to reward a sinful king. What made him worthy, they concluded, was not study or righteousness, but chastisement. His suffering had brought him into the kingdom of God when the study of scripture could not.

  Closing the volume in his hands, Ilya stood there for a moment, then went over to the sink. Here, by the toilet, was the only part of the cell that could not be seen through the Judas hole in the door.

  On the edge of the sink lay a safety razor. Ilya set down the book, then picked up the razor and extracted the blade. Taking the book in his other hand, he carefully slit open the base of the spine. Then, reaching inside, he removed what he had put there the night before his arrest. It was a lock-picking kit, with a torsion wrench and four picks, that he had taken from Brodsky’s flat.

  Ilya weighed the picks briefly in his hands, then inserted them into the binding again and put the book back on the shelf. He did not need them yet. One day, however, they might prove useful.

  Because even in a life of exile, he thought, there was always the promise of return.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks, as always, to my agent, David Halpern; to everyone at the Robbins Office, especially Kathy Robbins, Louise Quayle, Arielle Asher, and Micah Hauser; to my editors, Mark Chait and Danielle Perez; to Kara Welsh, Talia Platz, Jessica Butler, and the rest of the team at New American Library; to Jon Cassir and Matthew Snyder at CAA; and to Dave Daley, Gardner Dozois, Alla Karagodin Holmes, Alexandra Israel, Jesse Kellerman, Ian King, Trevor Quachri, Stanley Schmidt, Jesse Wegman, and Stephanie Wu. Thanks as well to my friends in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere; to my family; to all the Wongs; and to Wailin.

  * * *

  Don’t miss the next novel by Alec Nevala-Lee,

  ETERNAL EMPIRE

  Available from Signet in 2013.

  * * *

  Arkady arrived at the museum at ten. When a guard in white gloves asked him to open his bag, he unslung it from his shoulder and undid the top flap. The guard ran a penlight across the main compartment and thanked him absently. Arkady nodded and took the bag back again, careful to keep it upright. Then he continued into the entrance hall, past the masonry piers and urns of flowers, and headed with the other visitors into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  On this weekday morning, half an hour after opening, the museum was not especially crowded. Looking around the bright domed space, Arkady took in the flocks of tourists and children, the retirees and art students, and, above all, the guards in their white shirts and black ties. He had known that the search of his bag would be perfunctory, but he was more concerned by another detail. The guards at the doors only rarely carried guns, but today one was wearing a sidearm.

  A few minutes later, he was climbing the grand staircase, a visitor’s pin secured to his bag. Instead of passing under the arch into the main line of galleries, he turned and went down the hallway of drawings to his left. Later accounts would emphasize his dark complexion and Uzbek features, but in reality, he was simply a slender, rather handsome young man of medium height, with something of the bearing of a former soldier, which was precisely what he was.

  He continued into the next wing, a gallery lined with statues by Rodin and Bayre, the famous sculptor of hunting scenes. Most of the visitors were filing toward the far end of the hall, where a special exhibition was taking place, but Arkady headed for a door to one side. Security footage would later reveal that he hesitated only briefly before crossing the threshold.

  Inside, the gallery was quiet, with a single pair of visitors in sight. It was a large red space with a parquet floor and a bench set beneath the skylight in the ceiling. As Arkady went in, he noticed a guard in a blue polyester suit standing in the doorway to the next room, her back turned.

  He had visited this gallery twice before. Without looking, he knew that the walls were covered in canvases by Ingres and Gericault, with one particularly notable portrait, of an elongated nude glancing back over one shoulder, hanging directly across from him. To his left was the work he had come to see, but he did not look at it yet. Instead, he pretended to study the canvas beside it, a painting of a woman being abducted by two men on horses, as he waited for his moment to come.

  At last, the other visitors drifted out of the room. Aside from the guard in the doorway, he had the gallery to himself. Keeping her uniform in his peripheral vision, Arkady turned away from the picture before him, his heart quickening, and approached his true object of desire.

  It was not a work likely to catch the eye of a casual viewer, a small oil painting, thirteen by twenty inches, depicting a landscape of low mountains. In the dis
tance lay a body of water, perhaps an inland sea. A few groups of figures in pastoral clothes were scattered across the composition. At the center, a woman, naked from the waist up, was milking a mare with a white stripe down its nose.

  But the most striking figure was a man lying before a crude hut, clearly out of place among the rest. He was leaning on one elbow against the sloping ground, his body draped in a loose robe, and his head was bowed, as if he were brooding over the remembered geography of a faraway land.

  It is not impossible that Arkady Kagan, as he stood before the painting, felt some kinship with this model of exile, so far from home, cut off from those he knew and loved. A second later, however, the feeling passed, and he noticed that the guard in the doorway was gone.

  Arkady looked around the gallery. He was alone. It was sooner than he had expected, but he had no choice but to move now.

  Opening the side pocket of his shoulder bag, he removed a folded magazine, which was held shut by a pair of rubber bands. Inside was a flat glass bottle the size of a pint flask. Arkady unscrewed the top, allowing a puff of white vapor to escape, and turned back to the picture. He gave it one last look, staring into the face of the exiled poet, and before he could lose his courage, he took a step back and flung the contents of the flask at the painting.

  It would later be determined, from the pattern of splashes, that he had swung the bottle three times. The restoration report would note in passing that if the work had been doused with water at once, it might have been saved, but the guards had been understandably reluctant to act without further instruction. By the time the conservators arrived, the acid had eaten through to the underlying wood, carbonizing the oils and leaving three unrepairable holes.

  But all that lay in the future. As soon as Arkady had emptied the bottle, he let it fall to his feet. From his jacket pocket, which had not been searched, he drew a hunting knife. Unsheathing it, he went up to the picture, his eyes smarting from the fumes as the acid cooked its way through the pigment, and lunged forward, plunging the knife into the top of the painting above the central mountain. Then he pulled it down, using both hands, in a long vertical slash, slicing through the image of the distant sea and gouging the wood beneath.

  He took a step back, breathing hard. His plan, at this point, had been to drop the knife and go to the bench at the center of the room to calmly await arrest. Indeed, he might well have remembered to do this, altering everything that followed, had he not heard a startled gasp from behind him.

  Arkady turned. Standing in the doorway was the guard from before. For the first time, he saw that she was surprisingly young, with a sheaf of brown curls pulled back from her forehead. He saw her eyes flick toward the painting, taking in the damage, and then dart back to meet his own.

  If the guard had shouted for him to stay where he was, he would have done so gladly. Instead, as she looked at him in silence, he was suddenly overwhelmed by shame. Before she could say anything, he turned and walked away, the knife still clutched in one hand. Behind him, the stream of melting paint was flowing down the wall, pooling in a black puddle on the parquet floor.

  Leaving the room, Arkady found himself back in the main gallery, but he did not return the way he came. Instead, he headed to the right, ignoring the elevators, and passed into a pair of galleries devoted to Cypriot art. Beyond this was a staircase, which he took, his pulse thudding somewhere up around his ears. As he rounded the landing and continued down the next flight of stairs, a cooler part of his brain reminded him that the alarm would have gone out by now to the museum’s communication center, which had a direct hotline to the police.

  He descended to ground level and entered the splendidly renovated galleries of Greek and Roman antiquities, his footfalls echoing on the floor. Around him, visitors were staring, but he ignored their looks and pressed on past the headless statues. Only a hundred yards lay between him and the outside world.

  Up ahead, where the galleries gave way to the entrance hall, a guard was speaking into a handheld transceiver. When he saw Arkady, his eyes widened, and he lowered his radio with a shout: “Hey, you—”

  Arkady went past him without pausing. Part of him knew he should halt, but instead, he pushed his way through a knot of startled visitors at the ticket desk. The only way out was through the main doors.

  Passing the coat check to his right, he heard more shouts, but he kept going. The exit was forty steps away. Beyond the row of stanchions, he could make out the light of the summer day outside.

  He was nearly there when he heard another shout, the meaning of which became clear only later, and felt a pair of blows strike his chest.

  Arkady became aware of two things at once. The first was that he was still holding the knife, which he had intended to leave in the gallery. The second was that he had been shot.

  Looking up, he saw a guard standing before him, his face pale and disbelieving, his sidearm drawn. For a second, the two men stood eye to eye. Then Arkady glanced down at his chest. With his free hand, he touched the patch of warmth that was already spreading across his shirt, and then he fell to the floor.

  Arkady rolled onto his back, the knife falling from his fingers at last. In the ceiling far above, he saw one of three circular skylights, which reminded him, curiously, of the three holes that had been left by the acid. Feeling nothing but a strange satisfaction, he closed his eyes to that perfectly white sky, the blood pooling across the floor beneath him, and breathed out for the last time.

  In the aftermath of his death, there would be rumors of a racial component in the decision to open fire, leading to a number of protests. Ultimately, however, an investigation would determine that the guard in question, a museum veteran of ten years, had mistaken the knife in the other man’s hand for a gun. Since the situation had given him ample reason to regard Arkady as dangerous, the shooting, it concluded, had simply been a regrettable accident.

  Afterward, the press would compare the incident to other famous cases of art vandalism, including one notorious episode three years before in Philadelphia. And while some wondered why the dead man had ignored the more celebrated portrait by Ingres in the same gallery, surprisingly few ventured to guess why he had chosen to attack that particular work, a painting by Eugène Delacroix: Ovid chez les Scythes, or Ovid Among the Scythians.

  Also by Alec Nevala-Lee

  The Icon Thief